Hurricanes plus age pose challenges for surfers

On the first Saturday of this month, there was a pounding on the front door as I worked in the kitchen at the back of the house, hiding from the mid-afternoon heat — and other surfers. But the visitor was a surfer, my neighbor John, bringing me a gift certificate for a yoga class. Beneath his ubiquitous beige baseball cap his eyes blazed red in a stark-white sunblock mask, and his mouth stretched wide in the grin of stoke.

“Did you go to Suis?” he asked. “It looked great at midday, but I went to Lighthouse.” He laughed.

“I haven’t been out.”

“Oh. Well, did you catch Hector last week?” While the hurricane hadn’t struck the islands, it had delivered some 10-foot-plus waves.

“Too big for me,” I said. “Plus I was sick.”

“Yeah, it was kinda big. I went to Launch Pad, you know, Outside Ricebowls?”

Although I’d grown up in the neighborhood, I hadn’t even known there was an outside to Ricebowls, our famous big-wave break.

“Well, you better get on it, Mindy!” John said with a wave as he bounded down the steps. “See you at yoga!”

Been out? Going out? Everyone kept asking as the South Shore basked in a groundswell with waves of 2-4 feet, Hawaiian, and bigger outside sets. It was pumping.

I was swimming at low tide, trying to flush out my clogged sinuses, when Nicole, a graceful longboarder, passed me as she paddled out to Suis. “Aren’t you going?” she asked.

“Maybe later when the tide fills in.”

She smiled. “Good idea, but I don’t have the luxury to wait!” Nicole’s young son was playing in the tidepools with her husband; they takes turns surfing and watching the kid, as I used to with my husband, Don, when our boy was small.

To be honest, it wasn’t just my sinus infection or the tide that was making me hesitate: It was age. Nicole’s 15 years younger than I, and John maybe five, with a strong build and yoga flexibility that subtract at least another 10.

I have a boomer’s young mindset, but my body lags behind. Ashamed, I envisioned my epitaph: “Mindy wouldn’t go.”

SURFING IS dangerous enough when you’re at your peak, which for me was probably age 17. I told Don I was dialing back. It would increase my odds of staying alive, not to mention intact.

He replied he was relieved to hear it, after all those years of driving me to the emergency room. “I’ll never forget the time it was nearly dark and I was on shore, looking for you out at Acid Drops on Kauai, and suddenly I saw you dropping vertical down this double-overhead black face with bare reef in front of you, and I thought you were going to die. But you made it.”

That was 20 years ago.

Speaking of hurricane swells, did Don remember the time he drove out to Long Beach, N.Y., one September with his U.C. Santa Cruz classmate Bill Finnegan?

He remembered. The currents were powerful, the beachbreak big, beautiful, hollow. He was bodysurfing; Bill was on a surfboard. Trying to swim against the raging riptide while avoiding the rocky groins, Don blacked out. Bill found him lying on the beach, still wearing his fins but unable to remember how he got ashore.

That was 10 years ago.

Finnegan, near the end of his Pulitzer Prize-winning 2015 memoir “Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life,” writes about getting more reckless for a time after his parents’ death, even though he and his wife had a young daughter, Mollie. “I was rushing into places where I did not belong. On the bigger days at Puerto (Escondido, Mexico), I was the oldest guy in the water by decades.”

A near-fatal hold down at Makaha on a big winter day made him reconsider. “That was when I had a very clear thought about Mollie. Please. Let this not be my time.”

Like me, he continues to resist moving to a longboard and swims laps, “trying to slow the rate of decline.” But with stiffer knees and slower reflexes “the pop-up still gets trickier, more effortful, every year.”

Thanks to his book, I channel Bill in my own moments of surf humiliation or bliss. It feels good to know I’m not alone.

“In the Lineup” features Hawaii’s oceangoers and their regular hangouts, from the beach to the deep blue sea. Reach Mindy Pennybacker at mpennybacker@staradvertiser.com or call 529-4772.